Organize Your Family History

Stay focused and happy while exploring your roots

The beauty of wedding photos

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Arthur and Rhoda Brown, October 18, 1905Yesterday, I did a consultation with a 74-year-old man in need of organizing assistance. He proudly pointed to the wall in his hall where framed family photos were hanging. I looked at pictures of his kids and grandkids. But really drew my attention were the wedding photos. Each was such a snapshot of time.

I saw his own wedding photo, circa 1971. The bride’s dress stopped well above the knee. Fantastic. Then I saw his parents’ wedding photo, which was taken about 40 years earlier. The contrast was remarkable. It was so clearly of another era. More somber. More formal. More clothed. And absolutely beautiful.

It makes me want to find more wedding photos of my ancestors. A quick look through the small cache of photos that my mother has given me revealed the photo above, of my great grandparents, Arthur John Brown and Rhoda Wheeler. It was taken on the day of their wedding, October 18, 1905, in Nebraska. (Please forgive my crude photo of a photo.) It’s also a snapshot of an era.

One of my favorite department in Family Tree Magazine is Photo Detective, written by Maureen Taylor. Each month, Taylor points out historical clues in old photos. Taylor has a Photo Detective blog on Family Tree Magazine’s website. If you love looking at the details of old photo, you should check them out.

My dream genealogy staycation

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I’ve been very busy helping clients get organized recently and just have not taken the time to do genealogy research. I’ve been out all day most days and when I come home it’s all I can do to wrangle my email and get ready for the next day before collapsing with a glass of wine. (Well, it’s not quite that dramatic, but you get the idea.)

I find myself fantasizing about taking an entire week off to spend on doing genealogy research. In this dream stay-cation, I’d probably do the following:

That sounds like more than a week’s worth of activities, actually. But the truth is that the chances I would actually take a week away from clients and running my organizing business is pretty remote.

But you know what? I don’t need a week off to dig into this stuff. Heck, I don’t need an afternoon off. If I can capture an hour here or there, I’ll make progress.  And if I managed to put in 30 minutes most days, I’d make huge progress. It’s just like I tell my clients about decluttering: 15 or 30 minutes a day can make all the difference in the world. In fact, I got out my calculator and figured it out. If you declutter (or do family history research) for 3o minutes a day, five days a week, for a year , it comes to 130 hours. That’s more than three work weeks!

I still love the idea of focusing my efforts for an entire week. But for now, I’ll try to wedge about a half hour a day in and see what progress I can make!

Improving my ancestor map

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A map, cork board, foam core and frame make a great way for me to map my ancestors!I love the map I’ve put together to mark the birth and death places of my ancestors. Back in October, I blogged about the strategy I put into place on what to pin and how I make the pin flags. I pinned as far back as great grandparents before I hung the map, and that’s where I ran into a snag. I had been using a fabric-covered Homasote bulletin board that I had just pinned the map to. But when I rearranged my office and went to hang the map on the wall, I realized that the old bulletin board was so bowed it wasn’t going to hang well.

So I put a lot of energy (probably too much) into figuring out how to have an attractive, pinnable map hanging on my wall, and here’s what I came up with:

My husband, Barry, who in a prior life worked in a frame shop, helped me assemble the frame (well, he did it for me). I took all the pins out of the map and took it off the old board. Barry layered the map on top of the cork board on top of the foam core and slid them into the frame. Naturally, there’s no glass covering the frame. I then had the pleasure of repinning all the pins!

The result (pictured above) is attractive, I think. And very functional. I haven’t taken the time to add more pins (though I want to!), but even just with my parents, grandparents and great grandparents pinned, it’s such a treat to glance up and see where my roots lie. (That would be in Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, and Washington…and one outlier in California.)

I’m not a big DIYer, but this was one project that was not difficult for me. And I’m very pleased with the result!

Tracking progress

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My memory is not what it used to be. And I’m finding the more family history research I do, the more I’m duplicating effort. In the process of researching one person, another person will pop into my mind. I’ll look for a record for that person, rejoice in finding it, then realize I’d already found it!

So in an effort to avoid that, as well help me in my never-ending quest to not feel overwhelmed about my genealogy research, this past weekend I created a series of progress-tracking spreadsheets. I was inspired by Miriam’s Census Spreadsheet, which is a Google Doc. I’m a Mac user and I used the Numbers program (similar to Excel) to create three spreadsheets (so far) that track progress, by ancestor, on finding the following records:

Sheet 1: BMD

  1. birth records
  2. marriage records
  3. death records
  4. burial records
  5. grave photos

Sheet 2: Censuses

On the first table (pictured above) I have a row for each ancestor (this is a work in progress…I’ve been adding info a generation at a time and up to my great-great grandparents), and a column for each U.S. Census. I fill in the square in blue if that record was found. A grey square indicates the ancestor wasn’t alive for that census. A blank (white) square indicates I still need to find this record. I also have a table of state censuses, so I can note those.

Sheet 3: Military

Here I track what military records I’ve found for each ancestor, by war or conflict. This one’s definitely a work in progress.

Going through this process helped me realize how much census work I’d done and how much more work I had to do to find birth, marriage and death records. I think these charts will help me feel a sense of accomplishment and also help me hone in on work that needs to be done. I’ll keep adding ancestors from Reunion, until I’m caught up, and then plan to keep up with the spreadsheet as I find more records.